Tuesday, October 20, 2009

If you really are trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful, I would suggest you keep searching. "Damn, you's a sexy bitch" really didn't cut it, and your more recent attempt, "Damn, you's a sexy chick," is only an extremely minor improvement.

Monday, October 19, 2009

So you throw your son out a window your son jumps falls out a window and you write a song about it. Deeply personal, right? I always thought it was in questionable taste to release it as a single, but, whatever works, Mr. Clapton, whatever works. Obviously the song is very important to you--

What? You only wrote the first verse and then couldn't be bothered to finish? So you hired the guy who wrote "Looks Like We Made It" and two whole albums for Jimmy Buffett to finish it? And then when he said "I don't know, Eric, that seems awfully personal, maybe you should write it yourself?" you forced him to write it over these objections? That is hilarious. As is the fact that you only were writing it in the first place because the people who were making the soundtrack for Rush decided as an afterthought to ask you for a second song.

2. "Jack and Diane" by John Snow Leopard Mellencamp

I have a short list of songs that, every time they start, just hearing the first few unmistakable seconds hurts me more deeply than I can easily express. It's like a little piece of my soul dies, and my faith in the essential goodness of humanity is torn away and if you put a gun in my hands I might just turn it on myself at that moment. "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies is one of those songs. "Jack and Diane" is the other.

But, you know, working class hero! Mellencamp is a brave songwriter, representing the lower classes! The working man! The--

What's that you say, Wikipedia? "Mellencamp has stated in interviews that 'Jack and Diane' was originally about an interracial couple, but he realized that in the early '80s there could be backlash over such a song."

Melissa McEwan has a post about a satirical website called "Republicans for Rape" that's responding to some bit of legislative inanity that I can't be bothered to find out about because, really, anything coming out of Congress is going to be bad for me and you and anyone else who doesn't have money, so I have no patience for the details.

Anyway, basically her complaint is that these jokes aren't funny and just trigger rape survivors and are very painful for them. I tend to think that satire works best when its intended audience is horrified, but it's a complicated issue, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, so I won't take a position on that. But:

Republicans are just trying to protect their corporate sponsors, and if victims of rape are a casualty, so be it. The "Republicans for Rape" creators just hate Republicans, and if victims of rape are a casualty of hitting back at Republicans, so be it. What they share in common is that neither one of gives a fuck about rape survivors.

And you can't claim to be anti-rape if you don't give a fuck about rape survivors. It's really just. that. simple.

This, of course, comes from the woman who has posted about the Polanski case about nine million times in the past few weeks, whose group blog has posted about it more often, and who recently defended a post entitled "taking her side" equating being anti-Polanski with being pro-his victim. Which, judging from all of her public statements, the victim herself would disagree with. She has said that every time the case makes the news she feels victimized all over again. For McEwan this is irrelevant because, in her words, "justice doesn't operate on the principle of what's best for the victim; it operates on the principle of what's best for the community."

I realize, again, that this is a complicated issue, but I wish that McEwan would ever acknowledge that fact. In the world of her and her co-bloggers and her loyal readers (the comment sections there are creepy in their total agreement on everything), the world is entirely black and white, good and evil, and with the occasional recognized lapse (for which they will immediately apologize and "blub" and promise to learn from, because they are so self-righteously progressive in all things), they are 100% positive that they are on the good side.

For people who have bought into, for example, the lie that Hilary Clinton is a feminist force for good in the world and that any criticism of her can only be founded in misogyny, this is kind of a laugh riot. Of course, with that starting point, pretty much anything is gonna be a laugh riot. Or, as they would say in their twee internet talk, LOLsob.

OK, enough about Shakesville. I promise to leave them alone for a while.

(NOTE: It is solely in the interests of brevity that I ignored the Republicans vs. Democrats tribal/sport team aspects of the post, but, needless to say, oh my god how stupid can people continue to be?)

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Paul Revere & the Raiders have an "Eleanor Rigby" ripoff called "Undecided Man" that I like quite a bit even though it's done nothing to deserve it. Nothing, that is, except for the first two lines, the second of which I think is brilliant and pretty damn profound:

I've been thinking twenty-two years all about itThe closer I get to the truth the more I doubt it

Thursday, October 8, 2009

US foreign policy leads directly to situations where rape is used systematically as a weapon, all over the world. Obviously, you morons. I admit that I am in woeful ignorance of the situation in Guinea, and actually have no idea what US interests are there, if any, but I do know that similar horrible events happen all of the world, daily, as a result of the actions of our State Department. Clinton can say she's horrified all she wants, it doesn't mean she's not culpable. If I wanted to I could say I was horrified of sandwiches and it wouldn't change the fact that I just ate one.

Edited to add It is always useful with public figures to pay attention not to what they say, but to what they don't say. Clinton apparently feels perfectly free to denounce brutality in Guinea. Why there? Where is there identical or worse brutality going on that she's not talking about? Why do you think that is?

Ethan's working through his music collection in alphabetical order

(Project began May 29, 2010. Finished through the letter B on April 1, 2011 with 460 items catalogued on Rate Your Music.)

Ethan's reading

Samuel R. DelanyTritonaka Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Thoughts that aren't getting whole posts

- I just caught my cat licking one of my dirty shirts. When he saw I was watching, he pretended he'd been cleaning himself all along. -ethan 9/23/11

- I didn't know The Pixies covered "I've Been Waiting for You"! So on Heathen, David Bowie covered The Pixies AND a song they covered? Weird. -ethan 9/21/11

- Dangerous Visions is so goddamn macho. And like half the writers are military or "intelligence" or government or advertising dudes. It largely bites. -ethan 9/10/11

- I wish people would figure out that "HD" is not even close to "like you're actually there"--it's completely different from how we really see things. If they figured that out, maybe it would occasionally be used interestingly. -ethan 9/9/11

- Robinson Crusoe on Mars has its major problems, but it looks like a series of living Nicholas Roerich paintings. -ethan 9/3/11

- I just plain don't like Brian Aldiss. -ethan 8/31/11

- Here, at least, it was a good hurricane. I'm embarrassed by how happy I was when the electricity came back on. -ethan 8/28/11

- Is it my imagination or is IOZ way more open about genuinely caring about things since his return? -ethan 8/26/11

- Does Firefox constantly tell British people that they're spelling labour and programme and theatre wrong? -ethan 8/25/11

- There is a huge (and hugely important) difference between knowing that events a, b, and c happened between years x and y, and understanding that they were happening at the same time. -ethan 8/24/11

- Among the many things bugging me about the crappy novel I'm reading is that it keeps referring to a woman whose "late teens" were "forty years ago" as a "little old lady." Come on now, she's 59 at the oldest. -ethan 8/22/11

- Spending a day in the woods is the best thing in the world. -ethan 8/21/11

- Maria Mies: "Powerless groups, particularly if they are totally integrated within a system of power and exploitation, find it difficult to define reality differently from the powerful." -ethan 8/20/11

- The funniest sentence in Frankenstein: "I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition." -ethan 8/18/11